from the hands-off dept

So, it's been nearly three months since Valve announced that it was going with a new policy for the Steam gaming platform that was supposed to basically be hands off, with only "illegal" and "trolling" games being disallowed from the Steam store. As with all things Steam, the end result of what was supposed to be a transparent and simple policy turned into a shitshow, with developers having no idea whether once-banned games would suddenly be allowed, and some developers that were contacting Valve to get their games included were being told that their bans were still in place. There must have been a fair amount of frustration in the developer community, because Steam last week attempted to clear up its vague language in its policy. This attempt to clear things up, of course, cleared up basically nothing.

And, yet, the policy marches on. For all of the frustration on the part of developers, it appears as though we have our very first real tangible result, so let's all celebrate the first 100% uncensored adult visual novel title making it to Steam in the coming week or so.

Things were looking dicey for a little while, but it seems like Valve is set to start allowing uncensored adult games onto Steam. Well, some of them, anyway—starting with Dharker Studio’s lingerie-centric visual novel, Negligee: Love Stories.

Today Dharker announced that the game—previously stuck in limbo while Valve sorted out tools that’d allow users to filter objectionable content—will be coming to Steam on Friday. The developer says it’ll be its “first ever 100% uncensored game on Steam” and added that there’s “no patch needed.”

Whatever you might think of the adult visual novel genre of games, it must be said that this is progress along the road that Valve laid out. A game that once would have been banned no longer is, while the platform has indeed finally begun to put more filtering tools in place, and has also begun requiring that developers be more explicit about which parts of its game are controversial and in what ways. So, unless you want Steam to babysit your sensibilities, this is progress of a kind.

Still, getting only to this benchmark after three months doesn't fell all that impressive. Add to that the fact that this is all still a mess for much of the developer community and it's hard to give Valve glowing marks right now.

I reached out to other developers I’ve spoken to in the past about this issue, and they reported mixed results. Boobs Saga, a “satirical 3D action” game about escaping from a dungeon and probably also boobs, hasn’t been approved yet, but developer Georgiy Kukhtenkov told me in a DM that he was asked to fill out the mature content survey, too.

Things aren’t going so smoothly for James Cox, developer of You Must Be 18 Or Older To Enter, a lo-fi horror game about porn that’s not actually porn itself. His game got booted from Steam last year, and he said in an email that he hasn’t been able to resubmit it yet.

Anyone who has paid attention to how this story has evolved over the past few months knows that what developers and game makers want more than anything is clarity on what Steam will and will not allow. Perhaps we can write off some of the current struggles to growing pains within the policy, but we certainly don't have clarity just yet.

from the oh-look,-we-have-policies dept

Earlier this week, we wrote about a really dumb move by Google to effectively kick out all of the bloggers who use its blogger platform to post "adult" content -- either text or images. Google gave such bloggers just 30 days to find a new home before it would make all their blogs private. It insisted that, going forward, the content police at Google would determine what photographs were "artistic" and allowed, and which were "dirty" and not allowed. As we noted, this move seemed particularly tone deaf and problematic, and could lead to other problems for Google. And a lot of other people agreed.

This week, we announced a change to Blogger’s porn policy. We’ve had a ton of feedback, in particular about the introduction of a retroactive change (some people have had accounts for 10+ years), but also about the negative impact on individuals who post sexually explicit content to express their identities. So rather than implement this change, we’ve decided to step up enforcement around our existing policy prohibiting commercial porn.

Blog owners should continue to mark any blogs containing sexually explicit content as “adult” so that they can be placed behind an “adult content” warning page.

Bloggers whose content is consistent with this and other policies do not need to make any changes to their blogs.

Thank you for your continued feedback.

So, kudos to Google for at least hearing the feedback and rolling back the change -- though it's still unfortunate that it even had to come to that in the first place. It seems likely that many of those bloggers may go looking for alternate hosting anyway.

Frankly, this is ridiculous. Yes, Google is a private company and has the right to do whatever it wants, but this sort of prudish, paternalistic role in determining what content is appropriate and what content is "artistic" or "educational" is a path with a lot of landmines that will lead to stifled speech on a platform that used to be celebrated for enabling free speech around the globe. On top of that, you have people who have used the platform to post this kind of information and content for over a decade suddenly being evicted with 30 days notice. Yes, this is always a risk that you take when you rely on someone else's platform, but it's a really unfortunate move from a company that one would hope would know better than to take such a hamfisted position on what content it "allows."

Of course, as Violet Blue notes, this is only the latest in a long line of moves by Google to stifle, hide or block any content that is sexual in nature. Here's just a snippet of a much longer piece by Blue, detailing the timeline of recent decisions by Google, all of which push content the company deems inappropriate further and further away:

It was one thing when Google Plus rolled out in June 2011 with a strict anti-adult, no sexual content policy for its troubled attempt at a social network; many of us just didn't bother participating, knowing how the content-policy ax always falls (not on the side of artists, writers, activists, LGBT people, or cultural outsiders who speak up).

In February 2014 adult and erotic content was banned from Chromecast, followed by March 2014's ban and purge of adult and erotic apps from Google Play (Android's app and media hub).

April saw an ongoing series of Google Search algorithm updates that savaged existing adult website rankings, causing major disruptions in traffic and revenues for many websites.

So it's no surprise that many people believe that Google won't uphold its "freedom of expression" stance when it comes to organic adult search results.

I'm sure there are plenty of good business reasons why Google no longer wants to have this kind of content available on its site, but it's disappointing on multiple levels. It's not "censorship" in the classical sense, but it does seem like a really bad move by Google. It's a company that should know better, and often holds itself up as enabling more speech around the globe, and avoiding making any sort of "artistic" decisions on the worthiness of content. It is immensely troubling that this company now suddenly wants to determine which content it thinks is "appropriate" and which is not, not based on any legal requirements, but on a very subjective standard. Facebook did this sort of thing from early on in doing ridiculous things like banning "breastfeeding" images, and one would hope that Google would take a more reasonable stand. On top of that, giving people just 30 days to figure out where to go, when many have built up their blogs for over a decade just seems tremendously callous.

Google is a private company and can make its own choices, but this one seems like a particularly bad choice, which may have other consequences as well. For years, Google has pushed back on demands from copyright holders to magically monitor all its content, saying that it's just not possible. Yet, here it is now saying that it's willing to do exactly that, including making "artistic" judgments on the merits of whether adult content is purely prurient or done for a more artistic or educational reason. The company seems to be opening itself up to charges that if it can make such determinations for that type of content, it can also magically figure out what other content is "infringing" or not. This seems like a move that the company will regret.

While this is certainly Apple's right to do, this is one of the reasons why, in the long run, Apple's rather arbitrary app store policies are going to backfire. Developers are increasingly getting pissed off, or worried that Apple might suddenly pull the rug out from under them, with little explanation and barely any recourse. That's not an environment that appeals to developers in the long run. Yes, given the size of the iPhone (and soon iPad) market, plenty of development will continue. But in the long run, some of the more innovative and valuable apps will appear on other, more open platforms first, and make those platforms more appealing.